


the grave is not its goal

by Makari Crow (Beanna)



Category: Skulduggery Pleasant - Derek Landy
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Book 3: The Faceless Ones, daily reminder that & is platonic, or as much of things like that as China ever has, the canonical character death has also already happened, the violence has all already happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2019-09-20 01:38:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17013105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beanna/pseuds/Makari%20Crow
Summary: In the mess after Aranmore, China has some arrangements to make.





	the grave is not its goal

China stared at the spot where Skulduggery had vanished for a long time.

Wreath was bleeding. From the corner of her eye, she could see the bone of his leg, out in the open air where it certainly didn’t belong. Bespoke stood frozen, much as she did. 

Valkyrie wept. 

Skulduggery Pleasant was gone from this world. 

Time passed. The world did not spontaneously derail itself for the lack of one skeleton detective. Eventually, China turned. There were things that needed to be done, and she wouldn’t accomplish them here. 

She ignored Wreath. Valkyrie was turning to Bespoke for comfort, and so didn’t need to be handled, or offered platitudes that China couldn’t muster even for herself. Low, Renn-- living if stunned, and capable of handling themselves. The other necromancers were dead, no action necessary. Crux was long, long gone, a problem that she would need to solve soon.

Bliss wasn’t there. 

He would have been, had he lived. Would not have been able to do otherwise than to see this fight out to its end, and the last remnants of the gate vanishing into empty air. Therefore, somewhere in the mess of bodies that remained was his. 

China left them all there, and went to see. 

She picked her way carefully around what was left of those who had fought and died. Some were recognizable. Some were not. 

He couldn’t have been near the woods, or she would have seen him, or the signs of his presence. Mr Bliss was not an exceptionally subtle man when it came to combat. Therefore China turned her attentions toward those pieces that remained near the farmhouse, and it was not long before a glint of metal caught her eye. 

Surely not. 

But she bent, and picked the thing from the remnants in which it rested. Pulling it free took some force, for it had been half-embedded in bone and earth, and when China held it before her eyes she recognized it. The cover was bent, wedged open, and the face of the pocket-watch was coated in a thin film of blood. 

It was her brother’s. 

She saw no sign of him, in the pieces laid before her. Shreds of flesh. Bone twisted and snapped where it was not outright pulverized to dust.

There was something terrible inside her, something curling low and nasty beneath her ribs, and her throat was closing up, suitable for no more than raw noise. If she tried to speak it would be both painful and pointless, so China did not. She knelt instead, intent on seeing if there was enough left to merit interring in her family’s crypt, and found her vision blurring without her consent. 

Her cheeks were wet, when she reached to find out why. 

Ah.

She blinked till she could see straight again, though it did little for the rest. The pocket-watch she tucked inside her shirt, that she could have both hands free, and she reached for the bone from which she’d taken the watch. 

China’s hands were red up to the wrists when she noted Valkyrie’s presence over her shoulder. “Do not,” China said, before Valkyrie could say something horribly sympathetic. She heard the click of teeth snapping shut, which told her she had, in fact, interrupted something. 

Valkyrie stood there. China set another piece of bone with the small collection she was amassing and sat back on her heels, turned her head to Valkyrie when she was satisfied for the moment. Something twinged, and China ignored it. “Did you need something, my dear?” 

Her voice was not entirely even. An unforgivable lapse. Valkyrie didn’t comment, but her gaze flicked down to China’s hands, and China could hear the question without having to be asked. “A proper burial is beyond impossible now, I’m afraid,” China said, giving the explanation Valkyrie hadn’t wanted. There was more to it, of course -- bone lasted, flesh would putrefy, and it would be prohibitively difficult to collect all the remains -- but Valkyrie was more concerned for the fact that China’s hands were covered in her brother’s blood. 

There really was no way to soften this for her. China didn’t try, instead wiped one hand on her trousers, and reached into her pocket for her phone. The clothing she would have burned anyway. 

Her assistant picked up within two rings. “I need you to order a coffin,” China said, without preamble. “There will be another addition to my family’s crypt.”

She paused. Flicked her gaze to Valkyrie, then beyond, where Bespoke and Low were. “Arrange for Valkyrie what she needs,” China added finally, trusting him to hear the ‘within reason’ that was appended, and she passed the phone to Valkyrie.

Valkyrie said something then, but China didn’t hear it. 

Such little things, to reduce her brother to. All told, there was no piece left larger than her two hands set together. A pitiful mess of scraps. His bones, the hard-set core of him, she would take home and lay in a coffin and seal into their crypt, alongside the family members he himself had killed.

Some part of China had always assumed Bliss would be the last of them. She was alone. 

But then, she had been alone for centuries. Bliss had made his choices, and she had made hers. The man who’d first made her laugh had died under the Cleaver imprint, perhaps. And perhaps that was a lie she told herself to make this death more bearable.

China didn’t care to examine which was truth further right now.

When her assistant arrived, forewarned and thus forearmed, they packed up what could be salvaged together, wordless. There was a sliver of bone no larger than half her little finger, and China thought, with a deliberate sort of idleness, of making a macabre token of it, wearing some portion of her brother next to her heart. 

Foolishness. And it would not do to _cling_ to some trinket in place of what had once been. The thought remained just a thought, and nothing more. 

China left Aranmore behind, and took her brother home.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Longfellow (A Psalm of Life) because reasons.
> 
> Also excavated in the grand hard drive tidy of 2018; this one I think was probably written two years ago? It's a thing. I have a lot of feelings.


End file.
